Your website should be an extension of your sales staff. It should help generate and nurture leads by educating prospects, something your salespeople usually do. Like a good salesperson, it shouldn’t just sit around and wait for the phone to ring.

So, are you using your website as an opportunity to solve problems for prospective buyers, or is it a brochure all about you? Are you demonstrating in a clear, honest way how your company and its products and services can ease their pain?

A real website is now the most important tool in your arsenal!

If your website is not helping you …

What is CMS software in the first place?
CMS stands for Content Management System, and for the purposes of this article we will be discussing website content management systems. Web CMS software allows you to easily and efficiently manage a website and all of the associated text, images, and other files without having the technical knowledge of web programming. That being said, as a person who does possess the technical skills of a web developer, I wouldn’t even consider foregoing the great benefits of a CMS for the nostalgic joys of manually managing a website and its content. …

Earlier this week I discovered that one of my best friends from college, who is now a professor in his own right, had never seen the abbreviation RT for retweet.  It was a somewhat sobering realization that even though we grew up with personal computers and Internet access, social media ken is not inherent to my generation. Finding out that a good friend, who is one of my more learned contemporaries, was operating without the base vocabulary for today’s online world inspired me to put together a quick primer of acronyms to rule the web.

Five Definitions to Start With

RT - …

We have been writing about business blogs lately. We are focusing on using WordPress to produce branded business blogs or blog-sites, leveraging the inherit search engine optimization advantages WordPress provides.

I gave a presentation at the Partners In Success chapter of BNI on 3/17/10 on why blog for business and what MB/I brings to the table. Here’s the narrated version.

MB/I Presentation on Business Blogs
(9-minutes)

Are you already using a blog to market your business? Let us know how it’s working for you.

Are you interested on starting one? Attend our FREE webinar.

Online Content Management Systems allow you to consolidate the entire back-end of a website into a single secure yet easy to access location.

Traditionally any time you wanted to make an alteration to a website you needed to contact your Webmaster, who would in turn render your changes into code and and then use specialized programs to upload this code onto the servers which shared your information with the rest of the world.

No matter how responsive or dedicated your webmaster, the need to work through an additional person would build in a lag - one which would only be exacerbated by …

As I mentioned last time, I’m updating my web site. And, as I mentioned last time, it’s slow going.

For those of us with existing web sites, it can be tough to find time to update it. It’s there; it exists. With other demands on our time and energy, we put effort into things that are urgent. That’s perhaps not a wise …

Flash, well known for its elegant moving images and animations, is the application of choice for creating beautiful websites. But many web developers have scrapped the idea of using Flash for business websites because text that is created in Flash is not always easy to recognize by search engines like Google. Search engine optimization has been, and continues to be, a priority for many businesses. So many web developers have gotten into the habit of settling for two alternatives: the less elegant look of a completely HTML site or a hybrid in which only some of the site elements, …

Over the past couple of decades, Internet users have learned that not all websites are created equal. There are a few things that the web savvy browser will look for without even realizing it. If you do not provide the answer, your visitors will come to their own conclusions.

Who wrote this page?

Remember that not everyone will find your website by typing it’s URL directly into their web browser. Most new visitors will follow links from search engines or other sites. One of the first things they’ll want to learn upon arriving is whom they are …
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You have heard of blogs and think they are not for you. Maybe your business doesn’t really suit the type of back and forth communication a blog thrives on, or maybe you simply don’t have enough time to write articles several times a week. Or, maybe you don’t like to write at all.

Don’t dismiss a blog just yet!

A blog site may be just what you need. A blog is really just a website. It just has the added functionality that allows visitors to comment on what you have to say or post. In addition to these posts people comment on, …

Two weeks ago Google announced “Rich Snippets,” a new campaign on their part to categorize frequently sought items. The four main categories they are focusing on at this time are people, businesses, products, and reviews.

What Google recognizes right now is patterns of letters. It cannot be said to truly understand them as words, let alone understand how they interact relative to each other. Perform a search for “Marissa Berger” and you will get a mix of company websites and individual social media profiles from different Marissa Bergers all across the country.

Rich Snippets will eventually give Google the …